Henrik Kniberg has a presentation online called “What is Agile?” It includes a method of visualizing risk as the gap between cumulative cost and cumulative value, as well as methods of visualizing risk mitigation strategies. I found it valuable. Here are some representative slides: Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Iterative Development
Customer Engagement
You want to actively elicit feedback from end users using short development cycles or by using prototypes and models during analysis. A good feedback cycle has the appearance of causing problems. It will cause emergent and latent requirements to surface. That means rework: the value of prototypes is that they push this rework back into analysis, where it has more value. And most important, good end user engagement changes end user expectations. It is only by participating in a feedback loop that’s grounded in reality that customers get the opportunity they need to reflect on what they’re asking for. If your customer changes their expectations in the process, you’ve both learned something. Embracing change doesn’t just mean reacting to it: it means providing the catalysts that accelerate it. — James O. Coplien and Gertrud Bjørnvig, Lean Architecture for Agile Software Development Read more →
Why Don’t You Go Ahead and Do Something?
We place the highest value on actual implementation and taking action. There are many things one doesn’t understand and therefore, we ask them why don’t you just go ahead and take action; try to do something? You realize how little you know and you face your own failures and you simply can correct those failures and redo it again and at the second trial you realize another mistake or another thing you didn’t like so you can redo it once again. So by constant improvement, or, should I say, the improvement based upon action, one can rise to the higher level of practice and knowledge. — Fujio Cho, President, Toyota Motor Corporation, 2002 Read more →
Guarantees vs. Commitments
A thought exercise: “How long will it take you to get to work tomorrow? Can you guarantee it? To give us a guarantee, you’d probably put a buffer on your answer first. I guarantee a team working to put together software for the next two weeks is engaged in something a lot less well understood than a daily commute. We can put in a buffer – promise less – to give you a guarantee, or we can work from our estimates and do our best.” — William Wake Read more →
Declaration of Interdependence
We increase return on investment by making continuous flow of value our focus. We deliver reliable results by engaging customers in frequent interactions and shared ownership. We expect uncertainty and manage for it through iterations, anticipation, and adaptation. We unleash creativity and innovation by recognizing that individuals are the ultimate source of value, and creating an environment where they can make a difference. We boost performance through group accountability for results and shared responsibility for team effectiveness. We improve effectiveness and reliability through situationally specific strategies, processes and practices. — Declaration of Interdependence Read more →
Respect the Classics, Man: No Silver Bullet
This essay by Turing Award-winner Fred Brooks is almost 20 years old now. Sadly, the ideas on incremental development are still considered outside the mainstream in IT, which continues to favor the widely-discredited waterfall approach. Read more →
The Waterfall Approach Persists as an Urban Myth
Much of present-day software acquisition procedure rests upon the assumption that one can specify a satisfactory system in advance, get bids for its construction, have it built, and install it. I think this assumption is fundamentally wrong, and that many software acquisition problems spring from that fallacy. — Fred Brooks, “No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering” We were doing incremental development as early as 1957, in Los Angeles, under the direction of Bernie Dimsdale [at IBM’s Service Bureau Corporation]. He was a colleague of John von Neumann, so perhaps he learned it there, or assumed it as totally natural . . . All of us, as far as I can remember, thought waterfalling of a huge project was rather stupid, or at least ignorant of the realities. I think what the waterfall description did for us was make us realize that we were doing something else, something… Read more →